Love is an antidote to all the hate,” say Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman, who headline Prime Video’s The Love Hypothesis. Based on Ali Hazelwood’s 2021 bestselling romance novel, the film follows Stanford PhD student Olive Smith and notoriously strict professor Dr Adam Carlsen as their fake-dating arrangement turns real.
Despite its familiar trope, Bateman, sporting a Notting Hill (1999) T-shirt, believes such stories should be told repeatedly. “Whether you can find anything original [or not], there is something special about this story. There are only seven stories, and we often tell those same seven stories over and over again. I have seen so many romantic comedies, in fact, I am wearing one. But what spoke to me about this one was the honesty the two characters, who are different from each other, had. They see the world differently. It’s a story about them accidentally falling for each other. [In life], we all want the same thing, love, safety, security, and peace. We just come about it from a different point of view,” says the actor.